Coffee and humans go back a long way-back to 800 A.D. Legend has it that an Ethiopian goatherd noticed that his goats were frisky after eating a certain berry. The goatherd, kaldi tried the berries and found it banished sleep. Local monks heard of this wondrous berry and tried it out, making a drink of the berries. This discovery spread to Arabia, where sometime after 1000 A.D. coffee beans were roasted and brewed. Coffee as we know it had arrived. By the 13TH century, it was
a popular drink with the populace. The Arabians, being inv
eterate travellers, spread the coffee habit wherever they went, North Africa, India etc. However realizing the advantage of controlling the growing trade in coffee, they kept the fertile beans and their cultivation a secret. Thus only infertile beans (made infertile by boiling or parching) were traded and so no coffee was grown outside Arabia (and Africa of course) till the 17Th century. It is said that in the 1600s, an Indian traveller, Baba Budan smuggled fertile beans from Mecca, leading to a coffee cultivation boom worldwide.
Coffee reached Europe in the 1600s where it was considered an exotic new drink. Coffee was a prized commodity and therefore affordable only to the rich. The growing popularity of Coffee meant that the traders were desperate to control production. In 1696, the Dutch managed to start a coffee plantation in their colony, Java (now a part of Indonesia).
The plant was so valued that it was given as a present to kings. The Dutch, for example, gave a coffee plant to the French King, Louis XIV for his garden, Jardin des plantes. It was from this garden that a French naval officer, Gabriel Matthieu de Clieu stole a clipping tom grow this much sought after plant in Martinique (a French colony). Coffee had reached south America.
The hunger for gaining a foothold in the coffee trade has led men to machinations, romantic dalliances, and Machiavellian plots. In 1727, Brazil sent Lt Col Francisco de Melo Palheta to get coffee plants from the French. The Governor of French Guyana’s wife became an unwitting pawn in this ambition. Brazil’s preeminence in coffee production is thanks to Palheta’s successful campaign. And thanks to Palheta, coffee became a common drink, no longer was it a drink for the aristocrats.
Today coffee is grown commercially in several continents – South America, Asia and Africa dominate. The top coffee producing countries include Brazil, Columbia, Indonesia, India and Ethiopia. Two species of coffee are of commercial importance, Arabica and Robusta. The former is believed to have originated in the kaffa province of Arabia while the latter hails from Central Africa.
Coffee has come a long way since Kaldi, the goatherd discovered it. The name, coffee also reflects this history as it arises from the Arabic Qahwah which in Turkish become Kahveh. The Europeans called it café in French, caffe in Italian, koffie in Dutch and Kaffee in German.